Observational upper limits on the gravitational wave production of core collapse supernovae

The upper limit on the energy density of a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background obtained from the 2-yr science run (S5) of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Ob-servatory (LIGO) is used to constrain the average GW production of core collapse supernovae (ccSNe). We assume that the ccSNe rate tracks the star formation history of the Universe and show that the stochastic background energy density depends only weakly on the assumed av-erage source spectrum. Using the ccSNe rate for z ≤ 10, we scale the generic source spectrum to obtain an observation-based upper limit on the average GW emission. We show that the mean energy emitted in GWs can be constrained within < (0.49–1.98) Mc2 depending on the average source spectrum. While these results are higher than the total available gravitational energy in a core collapse event, second- and third-generation GW detectors will enable tighter constraints to be set on the GW emission from such systems. Key words: gravitational waves – supernovae: general – cosmology: miscellaneous – gamma-ray bursts. 1 I N T RO D U C T I O N Core collapse supernovae (ccSNe), neutron star (NS) births and black hole (BH) births have long been considered to be likely obser-vational sources of gravitational waves (GWs). For many decades, effort has gone into estimating the GW emission from such source